Background

On 29 June 2021, in response to the call of the European nuclear industry and the R&D&I community, the European Commission organized the first EU Workshop on Small Modular Reactors (SMRs). This event showed a growing interest across the EU in this technology and innovative business model, which is gaining momentum world-wide, and confirmed its potential to play a role in the overall decarbonisation efforts and security of energy supply.

A major outcome of this workshop was the endorsement of a “vision paper” widely supported by the stakeholders, including a proposal for a European SMR Partnership in the form of a collaboration scheme involving industrial stakeholders, research & technological organisations, interested customers, as well as European policy-makers and regulators with the aim at creating enabling conditions for the first SMR to start operating in Europe by the early 2030s.

The first phase of the Partnership, called pre-Partnership, started beginning of 2022 and was coordinated by a Steering Committee (SC), which provided general direction to enable the drafting and rolling out of a roadmap – shared and endorsed by all the relevant stakeholders – to facilitate the development and deployment of SMRs in Europe. This Steering Committee was supported by five Work Streams (WSs), essential for the SMR technology outlook, and safe deployment in the EU:  i.e. market integration and deployment; licensing; financing and partnership; supply chain adaptation; and innovation, research and development.

The results of the different analyses performed in the frame of the European SMR pre_Partnership are presented in different draft reports. To ensure openness and full transparency in the preparation of this European SMRs initiative the draft reports were published mid of July 2023 for comments from stakeholders. The consultation has been launched through the EU Survey Tool. The consultation ended the 29 September 2023.

The stakeholders’ Forum:

In order to inform stakeholders on the progress made and on the challenges encountered to launch the European SMR initiative and obtain further feedback on outcomes of the pre-partnership work from stakeholders who show interest in the topic but were not directly involved in the SC or the WSs themselves (policy-makers (MEPs, MSs, EU institutions), NGOs, other EU industry representatives, etc.) a Stakeholders’ Forum is organised the 26 October in Brussels in the European Commission premises with the aim to address some of the main challenges identified during the pre-partnership phase:

• Establishment of schemes for developing costs sharing and risks sharing, up to the successful deployment of the first units.
• Collaboration among regulators of those countries which will host this series of identical SMRs and the way to perform their safety assessments through enhanced inter-regulator exchanges, while maintaining their full sovereign responsibilities.
• Capacity of the supply chain to deal with increased manufacturing and construction workload among several European providers with homogeneous industrial practices.
• Capacity of R&D to address the knowledge R&D gaps (depending on technology) and to provide elements for the SMRs safety demonstration and performance.

Expected participation: +/- 100 in-person attendees + web stream